The harsh reality about the internet for web designers
“, Apple Safari and much much more. The biggest problem is they all render web pages slightly different. But don’t worry, if you follow this course and read about the subject you will design a stunning website that looks almost the same on every browsers.As a web designer, there are a few things that you need to grasp so that you can unleash the talent you’ve got to create those stunning websites. Here we are discussing some of the harsh realities of the internet that you should be aware of.
1- Web design is not about being fancy and pretty
True, People go to website because they are looking for something. It might be a picture, a video clip, a graph, a story, or simply anything. If people want to see something pretty, they can simply look at a mirror, or watch a baby laughing. Web design is all about delivering the information to the website visitor. If a website looks like a painted canvas, where will people get the information they came to the website for in the first place then. Therefore, when you are working on a website, make sure that it is easy to understand, easy to navigate and above all delivers the information in the easiest and the quickest way possible.
Web design is not all about being fancy and pretty!
2- Users may not always come to the “Home” page.
People use search engines like Google, Yahoo, Bing etc. to find things. If they stumble upon your website through a search result page, they will not necessarily come to the home page of your website. Therefore, make sure that the website purpose or description exists everywhere on your website. Also, include a way for people to navigate through your website easily from almost every page.
Sometimes people visit your website using a search engine
3- “Myriad Pro” is not a standard web safe font!
What does that mean?! It simply means that not everyone on this planet has all the fonts you have installed on your computer. There’s something called Web Fonts Safe List and in a nutshell it is simply a list of fonts that includes that most likely fonts found on the majority of computers on this planet. So in your website, make sure that all your headlines, body text and text links belong to a Web Safe List. Dustin Brewer has gathered a list of web safe fonts on his blog
4- Not everyone has the same 17″ DeLL monitor as you!
And defiantly not the same screen resolution! It means that you cannot guarantee that your website will look exactly the same as it does on your monitor on everybody else’s monitor on this planet. Not to mention the screen resolution, their color profiles and so many other variables. So what you can do in this case is to try to design a website that is suitable for average Joe’s monitor. One of the biggest enemies of web designers is you design a website and then it has the killing horizontal scroll on somebody’s screen. It simply means that there are going to be some parts of the website that are not viewable and you loose potential readers to this right hand news column per se!
Not all monitors created equally!
5- Not everyone uses Internet Explorer to view a website.
For example, try reading this post about Who is gaining ground and who is losing in web browsers war? You’ll notice instantly that people use a wide variety of web browsers. Internet Explorer, Mozilla Firefox, Google Chrome ” my favorite “, Apple Safari and much much more. The biggest problem is they all render web pages slightly different. But don’t worry, if you follow this course and read about the subject you will design a stunning website that looks almost the same on every browsers.
Web Browsers War
6- Not everyone uses Windows based computers to view a website.
People use different operating systems: Windows, Mac OS, Unix …etc. In fact, not everyone has a “Computer” to view a website. Yeah People may visit a website from a mobile phone, PDA, web TV … etc.
But!
Still, Web Design is Fun, Easy, and Stimulating.
And this is what we are going to discuss together during this course.
Further Reading:
http://inspectelement.com/articles/the-unwritten-rules-of-web-design/
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- [WDEC] PART:1-Introduction to web design
- Web design essentials course [WDEC]
- Who is gaining ground and who is losing in web browsers war?
